


Veins of Dust

by Zoadgo



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, NaNoWriMo, Night Scavenger!Clarke, Scavenger!Bellamy, Wasteland!AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 12:41:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2581793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoadgo/pseuds/Zoadgo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world was dying, so we set it on fire. The scientists who destroyed everything have long since died and faded from memory, but the effects of their mistake still linger in the desert that the last dregs of humanity struggle to survive in. Bellamy is a daywalker, a scavenger who faces the dangerous wasteland during the day in order to bring what luxuries he can to the few towns that remain. But of course there's more to this world than he ever could have imagined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Veins of Dust

**Author's Note:**

> Please be aware that this is an ongoing upload of my NaNoWriMo fic, so tags and characters will be added as they appear in the story!

The sun is hot. The sun’s always hot, of course, but it seems hotter than usual as Bellamy crawls from the relative coolness of the chicken coop he had spent the night in. Ripped wire barriers and a few feathers wedged into seams in the charred wooden structure are all that remains to tell the story of the previous residents. Probably taken by predators who had yet to die off or by people, back when food was just starting to get scarce.

Bellamy hardly makes it back to the faint line of an ancient road before a bead of sweat rolls down his neck. It doesn’t surprise him, but it does frustrate him. Every drop of sweat wasted is more water he has to drink, and less he can trade at the next town. Despite his displeasure with it, the sweat continues to trickle over his flesh in a vain attempt to cool him. His mind quickly ignores the minor discomfort, picking up on the dull hum of the motor vaporizing and condensing water to cool his suit, and the soft tread of his feet in the dust. He walks with an affected limp necessitated by the high resistance brace on his right knee that acts as a generator, turning his kinetic energy into electrical, and sending it to the pump that allows him to walk in the day while sweating a minimal amount, while keeping his skin covered from the sun’s harmful rays.

He drifts into a semi-daze, his pace settling into the gait that will allow him to cover a decent amount of ground without wearing himself out. His mind doesn’t drift, though, because that could very easily mean his death in the wasteland. Every tall dune of dust and sand and dilapidated remain of a structure from years gone by could be harbouring raiders or cannibals. 

The raiders are less of a concern for Bellamy. Sure, they’re ruthless sons of bitches, warped and scarred by the unfiltered sun, but most of them are idiots. They couldn’t make it on their own and weren’t smart enough to bite their tongue and fall in line in a town, so they formed bands of outlaws, attacking travellers to steal their hard earned, meager belongings. They rely on intimidation for the most part, but Bellamy knows he can beat almost any raider with relative ease. Plus, it’s better than the alternative. They would strip him of all belongings, leaving him to wander the desert barefoot until the sun wears him down and bleaches his bones, or the cannibals get him.

The cannibals, now… Well, at least they would kill him quick. There’s no point in torturing your food. Right now, he’s in no mans land, a stretch of territory where no towns or cannibal tribes have laid claims with signs, markings, or macabre sculptures of bones and frayed hair. Unfortunately, that means there’s more likelihood of running into the Reaper tribe, a nomadic clan of cannibals who are known for killing anything they see, regardless of if they need food or not. Some say they were patients of a mental asylum that burned down, whereas others think they were simply driven mad while searching for an end to the dust, an end that has long since become a legend.

But the sun marks his passage with its faithful trek across the sky, and Bellamy sees no other life to speak of. He investigates a few shelters, hoping for some small trinket that might fetch him a decent meal or a safe night’s sleep in the next town, but unfortunately there’s nothing to be seen there, either. He does have a small amount of water to trade, remnants of his last harvest, but it’s only enough for one of the two. Food or safety, a choice that people have to make all too often these days.

When Bellamy’s shadow disappears under his feet, he finds the nearest source of shade and tucks himself under it. It happens to be the shell of a car that he has to literally crawl under, but hey, it’s cooler near the ground anyway. It takes a little straining and some degree of flexibility, but he manages to remove his mouthpiece without damaging any of it. He carefully lays aside the contraption, placing its metal frame on the dirt and laying the damp rag inside of it, with the dry one that covers his mouth overtop of that. His method of filtering dust from the air only works if he keeps those rags clean, otherwise he’s just breathing in mud.

When that’s completed, he grabs a tiny flask from the inside of his boot. It holds just enough water to rehydrate him if he hasn’t been exerting himself. It’s never enough, though, and as the last drop soaks into his tongue he thinks longingly of the bottles in his backpack. There was a time when they all would have been filled, allowing him to sip water throughout the day and still have a supply for trading. But when you travel by yourself, distilling water is a difficult task. With no one to guard at night, he can only keep a fire burning for two days at most before he starts to slip up and becomes easy prey for any predators lurking around, be they human or preternaturally intelligent beast.

But those days of security and relative luxury passed along with his partners. And now he’s cowering under a pile of metal that no longer serves a purpose, waiting for the sun to begin its descent so he can keep walking. Bellamy determinedly refuses to think about the people he used to wander the wastelands with, knowing that going down that path is a recipe for disaster that he does not have the time for right now. Or ever.

Eventually Bellamy determines he’s rested enough, and he replaces the cloth over his mouth. Dry, wet, then the fine metal grate that holds it all in place. The fabric reaches the bottom of his goggles, but he still removes a glove and runs a finger along the seam to be certain that he’s left no flesh exposed. Last time he’d missed checking a joint in his suit, he’d ended up with blisters for days.

He bites back a groan as he steps into the light, suit immediately losing any vestige of coolness that it had managed to acquire in the shade. That was really the only good thing about the world nowadays. Everything was so damn dry that if you managed to get out from directly under the sun’s rays, it was noticeably cooler. Of course, nothing’s ever actually cold, but that’s probably a good thing due to the lack of fuel or fabric. Bellamy has no idea what people would do if there was a winter. Hell, he doesn’t even fully believe winter was ever a thing. It’s just a story his mother used to tell him, along with tales of gryphons and ancient emperors, and forests of plants. He glares at a scrubby bush that he doubts is even alive, as if it’s that plant’s fault that there aren’t any trees anymore.

He shakes his head sharply to clear it of those thoughts and focuses back on the road. He hasn’t seen any signs of civilisation yet, so it’s probably a safe bet that there’s not going to be a town any time soon. His scans of the horizon grow a little more focused, hoping for a house or any sort of shelter he can crawl into tonight. Sleeping in the open is never restful, but he does need to get some form of sleep eventually. And he doesn’t want to be on the open road when the sun goes down.

A bridge begins to form through the heat shimmers, a broken overpass that crosses over the road, and Bellamy makes a mental note of it. It’s not great, but barring alternatives it’ll do for some form of shelter. It would be even better if he could climb on top, then he might not even be visible from the ground. If he was, it would probably be too much effort to raiders or cannibals to come up and check him on the off chance that he’s not already a skeleton.

He begins to hope, despite knowing he shouldn’t, as he sees rubble and waste around the support pillars. Searching through refuse is a disheartening and disgusting job, but most people don’t do it. Sometimes you can find great things buried in trash, like lighters, pencils, and wet wipes. One time Bellamy had even found a jacket, slightly worn and heavily stained, but it had bought him one hell of an evening at a bar, and a bed he generously shared with a few locals afterwards. 

But Bellamy restrains himself from going right to the pile of litter and stone. First, he draws his weapon, a machete he’d picked up from a dead traveller, and circles the structure, mind always mapping an escape route. He has a deep scar down his back from when he’d been too zealous and rushed right to scavenging, only to learn the hard way that raiders are, in fact, smart enough to set a trap with their own gear as bait. 

When Bellamy reaches the point he’d started at, he still hasn’t seen any sign of humans, so he moves forward. He sheaths the sword and pulls a knife. Better safe than sorry when it comes to your life in the wasteland. If someone cuts just the wrong part of his suit, that’d be many months of suffering, before he could find a way of fixing it and enough luxuries to trade for it. So he keeps a weapon on hand, even as he begins to digs through the fallen chunks of cement.

He hardly looks at all before he sees something out of the corner of his eye. Something that’s too good to be true, so amazing it has to be a mirage. Poking out of the pile of debris is a boot, whole and relatively undamaged. Quite likely attached to a corpse, but most things of value are. Shoes are so incredibly valuable these days, now that there’s no manufacturers or even cobblers, he can hardly believe that this one has remained here this long. Perhaps it had been hidden beneath the trash, and some nosy beast had unearthed it. The few animals that remain obviously would leave it alone, so that’s really the only explanation that comes to his mind.

Bellamy beelines for it, images of a mattress and some freeze dried food dancing in his vision. He’d happily kill for those luxuries, so looting a dead person is nothing to him. It’s not the first time he’s done it, and it quite likely won’t be the last. He bends over the leather boot - and damn, that’s going to make him very popular when he finds a town - and practically rips his gloves off in order to untie the laces. The shoe really is remarkably well maintained for having been left at the mercy of nature for who knows how long.

“Get the fuck away from me.” A growl and the press of something, probably a blade, to the back of his neck freezes Bellamy in place as his heart races. Not a corpse then. This could be incredibly bad for him.

“I’d love to, but I have the feeling you might slice my neck open if I move right now.” Bellamy immediately hits himself mentally. _Do not sass the person who can kill you, Blake_.

As Bellamy braces himself for what he’s fairly certain is going to be his end, he hears a feminine grunt and the pressure lifts from his neck. He immediately sits back on his heels and scoots away from the not-a-corpse, perfectly content to leave it - no, her - completely alone and continue on his merry way. Unfortunately, she’s still pointing what he can now see is an honest to god katana at him with unnerving steadiness. So Bellamy stays right the fuck where he is, with his hands raised in the air beside him. 

“I’ve got a question for you, and your answer is going to decide if you live or die in the next thirty seconds.” The very dusty woman says as she stands from the rubble, walking closer to Bellamy who nervously clears his throat, eyes still firmly fixed on the edge of the blade. “Are you a raider, a traveler, a cannibal, or a daywalker?”

“Wh- Daywalker?” Bellamy mutters under his breath in confusion, and for the first time he actually looks at the person wielding the weapon, and it makes much more sense. She’s not wearing any sort of suit, but she also doesn’t have the telltale pink mottled scars of someone who wanders the wasteland without protection. Her skin is frighteningly pale, actually, as if she’s never even dared a few minutes in the sun. And when his eyes finally take in the blindfold tightly secured around her eyes, he knows that’s probably the case.

“You’re a nightcrawler?” He blurts out, damnable mouth once again possibly signing his death warrant once again. He can’t help it, he’s never actually met one before. He’d have thought they were legends, ghost stories, except for the fact that a few times he’s encountered towns that have turned down certain items because a nightcrawler had brought them in just hours before.

He has the strange feelings that she can see him, despite the blindfold blocking every hint of light from reaching her eyes. Hell, if the stories are true, she doesn’t even have eyes. Tales of humans who gouge out their eyes to form an unholy pact with demons, allowing them to wander the wasteland at night without being harmed, that’s all that nightcrawlers were to Bellamy. Until now, that is.

“I’m the one asking the questions here. Answer now, or lose your life. Cannibal, raider, traveler, or daywalker.” And Bellamy’s eyes snap back to the blade, as it moves closer to his throat.

“Jesus, I’m a daywalker, okay?” The word is fairly unfamiliar to him. But it is the term used to refer to people who lived primarily in the desert, coming into towns only for a night or two to trade. He just hasn’t had a long enough conversation in a while for it to come up, he supposes. When was the last time he actually talked to someone?

The nightcrawler doesn’t lower her weapon, but she doesn’t kill him either. She stands perfectly still, a statue that could take his life on a whim. One day Bellamy will manage to not be an idiot, and he’ll astound himself. He studies every inch of her as she seems to debate her course of action. 

The blindfold obviously draws his attention, a stip of red fabric with what seems to be a stylized eye marked in the middle of it. He’s not sure of the purpose, if she truly has no sight, but there’s no point to wasting thoughts on it since he’s in no position to see what lies underneath. He turns his gaze on her clothes and is honestly shocked by how little she’s wearing. A grey tank top that may have been pink or red at one point, if the hint of hue remaining is anything to go by, dark grey cargo pants, and well maintained leather boots. Her pack is probably buried in the rubble where she was sleeping, but he can’t imagine having that much exposed flesh at any time. Hell, Bellamy only takes off his goggles and gloves to sleep, because then he wakes at the first hint of sun.

The lack of scars on her is astonishing too. Anyone from the wasteland has scars from sunlight, or from fights. But she seems unmarred, eerily so. It almost gives life to the legends, but she’s not nearly as terrifying as they would make her out to be. With blond hair cascading over her shoulders, she strikes Bellamy more as a vengeful angel than a twisted servant of demons.

“Are you going to try to kill me, daywalker?” She puts emphasis on the last, almost seeming to look down on him for his habit of walking during daylight hours, like everyone else.

“You know, I have a name.” Is he really that desperate for human interaction, that he’s going to goad his potential executioner? The part of his mind that’s been kicking him for the last few minutes seems to give up all hope of him wising up and getting out of this alive. But Bellamy swears he sees a twitch of muscle at the corner of her mouth, and he dares to wish that it’s a barely concealed smile.

“You’ll find that most people do, even nowadays.” It’s a shame that she’s holding a sword pointed at him, because Bellamy’s starting to like this girl. Actually, who is he kidding, the sword just makes her that much more attractive. 

“It’s Bellamy. And yours? Or should I just call you princess, considering I’m kneeling at your feet anyway?” _Just stop there, Blake._ Of course, he continues. “Not that I’d mind, under different circumstances.”

The girl heaves a heavy sigh as Bellamy mentally embraces his imminent death once again. Why can’t he keep his damn mouth shut?

“My name’s not important.” And then the girl truly shocks him, by swinging her sword up and resting the flat of it on her shoulder. Bellamy doesn’t move yet, but his breath comes a little easier. “I want to be sleeping, and I’m fairly certain you want to live. It seems to me that we can help each other out here, if you can keep that tongue of yours under control.”

There are a million flirtatious quips that come to Bellamy’s mind, but his verbal filter finally kicks in and he doesn’t say any of them. Instead, he slowly climbs to his feet, still unsettled by the way that her sightless gaze seems to track him as he stands. He contemplates reaching for a knife, but somehow that seems like just about the worst idea he’s had so far today, and this hasn’t been a shining example of his intelligence.

“Seems like we can, princess.” He sees a hint of red colour her pale skin at that, but hey, she never gave him her name. She shakes her head a little and turns back to the pile of rubble she’d risen from, a monumentally cocky move when you don’t know the person you’re showing your back to. But then Bellamy realizes that facing someone or not, she still has the exact same sense of them. She’s not bound by her sight, like everyone who lives under the sun’s cruel reign.

“Since I would rather sleep than clean your blood off of my shoes, I’m going to let you go. If you just go straight on your way, and leave me alone.” She begins to shift the stones in order to bury herself again, and Bellamy contemplates helping her for a moment. But he has no reason to, and she doesn’t strike him as the sort of person who accepts help easily. So he watches her for a few seconds before nodding slightly and turning back on the path he’d been travelling before. He’s almost cleared the shadow of the bridge when he decides that he needs the last word in their conversation.

“Hey, princess!” He calls back over his shoulder. “Don’t forget to cover your shoes this time!”

He hears a pause in the active and something that sounds like a not so subtle mumble of “Fucking daywalkers”, and turns back on his trek with a rare smile on his face. He even chuckles slightly as he steps into the sun, and he wishes that nightcrawler well. 

Through the long, hot journey to what looks like it may have been a grain silo at one point, her voice stays with him. Bellamy’s spirits are higher than they have been in a long time as he eats a handful of dried soy protein mix, washing it down with one more meager ration of water. It wasn’t exactly luck that caused him to meet the nightcrawler, but he can only hope it’s a sign of good fortunes to come his way in the next few days. Really, things can’t get much worse than they’ve been in the last month. Bellamy curses even as he has the thought, knowing better than most people that tempting the fates is a dangerous game to play.

He lays his head down his a slightly troubled mind, but images of steely hands and soft blond hair blowing in the wind lull him to sleep. For the first time since Bellamy has been alone, he doesn’t fear what lurks in the night.

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, so I decided to do a fan fic for NaNoWriMo, so you guys are going to get 50k+ of Bellarke in a wasteland apocalypse! I'm currently around 10k, so I'll be uploading every other day. I hope you guys enjoy it! Edited by [coldsaturn](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com), who will be able to force me to write in person in eight days!
> 
> I love chatting with you guys [on tumblr](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com)! As always, thanks in advance for commenting/viewing/leaving kudos <3


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